We may no longer be a nation of celery munchers, but those nutty stalks are
still a wintry treat.

''If you were to stand on a hill during any Sunday afternoon in winter and listen carefully, you would hear a low, rustling, crunching sound,” wrote the British food expert Adrian Bailey in 1969. “It is the entire English nation eating celery.” We are no longer quite such celery munchers. When were you last offered a crisp stalk of celery to dip in salt along with a platter of teatime bread and butter? Afternoon tea now – if we eat it at all – is about cake. And celery just doesn’t go with cupcakes.

The thing about celery is that it is profoundly salty. Its sodium content is so high – around 80mg per 100g – that those following a no-salt diet are advised to avoid it. The traditional British taste for celery was part of a more general thirst for salt: for anchovy toast, briney bacon and mouth-burning cheddar. From my childhood I remember flasks of saline celery soup, and hard-boiled eggs dipped in celery salt.

Now our tastes are sweeter. Judging from cookbooks, we are becoming fonder of celery’s sweet relative, fennel, with its liquorice tones. Both celery and fennel are in the parsley family, but while celery speaks of stews and Stilton, fennel brings to mind aniseed drops and Pernod. When you cook fennel in a pan with butter, it caramelises to a sugary brown. It used to be that virtually all of our fennel was imported from Italy, but a new-ish British salad company, Steve’s Leaves, has started growing fennel tops to sell with other “sweet leaves” (£1.30 from Waitrose).

I love fennel, but it would be a pity to forget celery. Fenland-celery producers are currently applying for Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status, the status given to European specialities such as radicchio from Treviso and Sicilian blood oranges. I hope they get it. White celery from peaty soil in the Cambridgeshire Fens is only available from October to December, and its nutty stalks are a wintry treat. With its exuberantly green leaves, this is the celery you want to have in a mug on the table with a good hard cheese. It’s like an edible winter bouquet.

Cooking celery can be slightly tricky. It makes a delicate risotto, especially if you save a handful of leaves to add at the end with parmesan. Braising is another good strategy (delicious with game), but it’s crucial to reduce away all of the pot liquor, or else it will taste like hotel food from the 1950s. There’s also the question of stringiness. For most celery dishes, I peel each stalk with a swivel peeler, but on the Food 52 website Kristen Miglore advises against this for slow-cooked dishes: “On a long enough timeline, those strings are all that’s keeping the stalks from falling apart.”

Perhaps the best way to enjoy winter celery is raw, so you get the full salty tang. You can offset the salt with something sweet, such as apple (as in Waldorf salad). Or you can ramp up the salt with anchovy and lemon dressing, shavings of parmesan, or capers and olive oil. Either way, the main chore with Fenland celery is washing out the dirt – and sometimes even slugs – clinging to the hollows, before you start to make that rustling, crunching sound.